Tilt

A great collection of crafted and delicate poems that tell us what it is to be alive now.

— Costa Award judges

Tilt is an assured and convincing book of poems from a poet of incisive wit and subtle intelligence… the thematic scope of the collection often dazzles in its range and ambition.

— Ben Wilkinson, Tower Poetry

Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way — all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped.

These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or the 'fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment / to pounce on the accident / of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat — for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.

THE BIRKDALE NIGHTINGALE

(Bufo calamito — the Natterjack toad)

On Spring nights you can hear themtwo miles away, calling their mates to the breeding place, a wet slack in the dunes. Lovers hiding nearby are surprised by desperate music. One man searched all night for a crashed spaceship.

For amphibians, they are terrible swimmers:where it's tricky to get ashore, they drown.By day they sleep in crevices under the boardwalk,run like lizards from cover to coverwithout the sense to leap when a gull snaps.Yes, he can make himself fearsome,inflating his lungs to double his size.But cars on the coast road are not deterred.

She will lay a necklace of pearls in the reeds.Next morning, a dog will run into the water and scatter them.Or she'll spawn in a footprint filled with salt rainthat will dry to a crust in two days.

Still, when he calls her and climbs her they are well designed. The nuptial pads on his thighsvelcro him to her back. She steadies beneath him.